So, 2008 draws to a close, with more than a whimper than a bang. It’s been a year where I’ve got new stuff, broken old stuff, took hundreds of photos, and procrastinated more than ever. So, let’s look at the highlights of said year…

JANUARY

January started with a bit of a worrisome note. I thought I’d lost touch with Coatesy, after I sent him a Happy New Year text which never got delivered. I spent the new few weeks wondering what had happened to him. Turns out I’d sent the text to his old number, and on 25th January, I went round to his flat, and beat him at Track and Field

The 1st day of the year also saw the first photos uploaded to Andrew Dorrian’s Photo Gallery.

In Early January, the Shakespeare Pub, formerly the Catcote, was demolished to make way for a parade of shops, which are nearing completion.

Overall, I uploaded ony 16 photos to flickr, making it a very dull month photo-wise.

FEBRUARY

In contrast to the dullness of January, this month seemed to have everything, and that includes taking over 900 photos. For most of the month, however, I was the most depressed I’ve ever been over a stupid row about a packet of crumpets, and my even stupider anger. I’m quite sure the person involved will never truly forgive or forget it… I’m damn sure I’ll never forgive myself, or forget it.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and after being unable to sleep because of this incident, I got up before the cold winter sunrise, and walked to the headland to take some photos. Can you tell that I was crying when I took this picture? No? Good.

That was the incident which summed up the month for me. It wasn’t good, and it was all because of me.

Gary Smith left Employment Palace for pastures new.

It was certainly the month for unbelievable sunsets.

The streetlights on Easington Road FINALLY got replaced, after approximately a year of the new posts standing idle.

A little later on in the month, I went to Newcastle with Chris. Many photos were taken, including an almost exact copy of a image I’d seen on flickr many times…

Unfortunately, the longest Febrary for four years didn’t end with such an inspiring image. I had planned to take a catalogue of pictures, as it’s only something that happens every 4 years. Clearly this photo shoot never happened.

And I didn’t blog much. I did, however, blog about the earthquake which happened on February 27th. That was a very odd night.

MARCH

March’s blogs appear oddly to explain things that happened in February. Thanks to the afore mentioned crumpet incident. This included the trip to Newcastle in two mega blog posts, and also further detail about the earthquake.

A big brown envelope plopped on my doormat at some point in this month, I’d been summonsed for jury dury the following month. Balls. I took a bus ride to Middlesbrough to see how long it would take. Some shite photos were taken.

I also did a mega-tidy, which means that my carpet was seen for the first time in several years. It soon disappeared again. 317 photos were uploaded, none of them look particularly fascinating.

I also bought my first 500Gb hard drive.

APRIL

Early highlights of the month include the purchase of a 250Gb external hard drive, and my winning of several pounds on the Grand National.

The first major incident to occur was the major fire at the Bonne Bouche factory. Those were my photos, but you can never have enough photos of a major fire, so here is some that Andrew D took. He was lucky enough to have some of these printed in the paper.

Very little else happened which didn’t involve jury duty, hence very little blogging or photographs. However, during the weekend between my two weeks, I went to Durham with Chris. More photos were taken.

It was at this point (or around this point) that I started the record database, something whcih I’ve been building ever since.

Of course, there was the bus crash which demolished the brick bus shelter on Easington Road. Turns out April was quite a month for local stuff I could photograph. Humphrey Lyttleton also died, which was something I was truly gutted about.

MAY

This appears to be a month completely written off. Nothing happened apparently. I was sick of work as usual, and made my feelings felt in the only way I know how – blog about it. It was also the month of my mamoth walk around the town. I got plenty of photos, including some of my favourites of the year. Remember the new 500Gb HDD I’d purchased? Well, it began to die. Ironically, I mentioned that the power supply might have been at fault. I didn’t have that thought for another 5 months….

This is part 1… Part 2 to follow, hopefully this year.

Another thing I want to do before I’m 30, which I’ve literally just thought of while I’m sitting here… I want to bake a loaf of bread. Like, a proper loaf. None of that shit we used to make in school.

I’m blogging this now because I’ll probably forget, but this is the type of stuff I was thinking of doing originally. Stuff I’ve never done before.

Of course, baking bread will mean I’ll probably have to buy stuff. And clean the kitchen.

Yes! This is the best time of the year. The morning of 26th December. This is the longest possible time before we have to put up with anything to do with the “festive season”.

(EDIT: Let me just point out that the thing on the back of the sofa is a dog chew, not some type of weird sex toy)

This time, a year ago, I’d have been in a car on my way down to Stevenage, but there shall be none of those shenannigans this year.

Sooo, back to this Xmas then. Well, it was garbage, not that I expected it to be any different, therefore I wasn’t disappointed.

The day started with one of Daddykins’ friends dressed up in a Santa costume bearing gifts.

It was then a case of seeing which TV channel didn’t make me want to throw something at the TV. Turns out that they were showing Wallace and Gromit on UK Gold. Good stuff.

So, they were watched for the umpteenth thime, and Daddykins went out for his Xmas lunch. I thought it was about time that I cooked my own Xmas dinner…

Mmmm, is there anything more festive than a Morrisons boil-in-the-bag Chicken Madras for one, cooked in such a way that the rice was still partially frozen, and has to get zapped in the microwave for longer than what the box suggested?

Oh, OK. I shall await the comments regarding my curry consumption. There’s no point cooking a Xmas dinner just for myself.

Another reason why I strayed from the traditional festive grub (for the 29th year in a row) is that I’ve already had my fair share of Xmas dinners this year, the highlight being a visit to the Hillcarter a week or two ago. Mmmm. I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it.

But there’s one thing about hosted Xmas dinners which I think it complete and utter shit, namely Christmas Bloody Crackers, and their contents. Fine, the party hat is OK, and the jokes are predictably terrible, but what about the little prize toy thing? Why are they always completely shit? Take the afore mentioned dinner at the Hillcarter for example.

Why would ANYONE want a fake green fingernail? And why did I keep hold of it in the first place?

So this is Christmas, and what have you done? I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve done. I’ve copied and pasted an introduction to a post I first used back in 2003.

I’d just like to wish all of my readers a very merry Christmas, and I hope Santy Claws brings you something nice.

Well, as 2009 fast approaches, I’ll be planning to spend most of new years day walking around in a hungover fog. Well, OK, I do that most days, but on New Years day, it’s always time for the yearly backup, where I dust off my external hard drives, and dump everything important on Beastbits onto one of those. I’ve relied on this method of backup for many years, since USB2 came about, and although 99% of the time it works, I’d be screwed if something happened like the external drives break when restoring the backup, or god forbid, something causes both drives to fail due to an external force.

I’ve been considering online backups for a while, but it’s something I’ve never came to looking at in great detail.

My very first exploration came back in the days of JHP and Tracy, when randomly typing words between “www” and “.com”. One of the words I’d randomly typed was “driveway, this forming www.driveway.com, obviously.

Turns out, this was one of the earliest file storing sites. I think you got given 50Mb of space, and if I remember correctly, you could even use it as a drive in My Computer. Shiny. And it was.

But back then, there was no such thing as a free lunch, and they eventually ditched their “free” customers for their “pro” subscribers. Since then, on a disk, I have a folder named “driveway_bastards” including all of the stuff I had to re-yoink from their servers before they closed us.

TImes move on, and although there is still a driveway.com, I have no idea if it’s the same one I used all of those years ago. Anyway, I digress. Back on topic.

So, online backups. Back in March, I clicked a banner ad whilst on Myspace. This wouldn’t have been deliberate, but still it took me to www.mozy.com, a site offering 2Gb free “backup” space. OK, sounds like a larf. I thought I’d give it a go. I downloaded their “client”, and allowed it to do a backup of my laptop. It found 600Mb’s worth of stuff worth backing up, so the initial backup took an age.

Now this is where my cyber paranoia begins. They say it’s all 968-bit Blofeld encrypted, but have I really just sent all of my email database files, favourites, documents, etc. over the internet to a place I found because of a banner ad?

Yup.

OK, that worries me for approximately 60 seconds. The documents are unimportant, the emails are stored on a computer in Germany too, which is possibly unencrypted, and the favourites… meh.

Mozy begins to grow on me, and I use it more and more. I even install it on Beastbits and allow it to back up what is technically the same database files, favourites and documents, but before long, I begin to run out of free space. It was at this point, I ran around with the begging bowl, asking for people to sign up using my login ID as their referral so I’d get extra space. From that, I got an extra 500Mb. I also removed files I didn’t think I needed backing up, such as the email. Every account I use is IMAP, meaning that there’s no need for me to actually backup the email database. Should I have a proper HDD fuckup, I can just resynchronise the folders using the client of my choice (email client, that is) and they’ll all be redownloaded. Therefore, I could ditch the emails.

It still left me with little space to actually backup things that wrre important to me. Certainly, my pics folder, which is currently at 22Gb, only has a backup on an external drive, and as I said, if that dies at the same time my main drive dies, they’ve all gone.

I considered burning DVDs. Idea. But Murphy’s law stipulates that they’d be goosed too. Whilst building the DVD/CD database, I found an alarming number of disks that simply wouldn’t read in my laptop. Thankfully, there are only one brand of disk, but even then, I may have lost a large number of disks sue to shitty media. Who’s to say that this wouldn’t happen with a DVD backup? Who’s to say that the DVD backups wouldn’t be wiped out in the same catastrophic event that ruined two hard drives?

I was discussing this very same thing with one of my real-life-with-blood-and-bones-and-everyfink frriends. Just out of pure randomness, I asked “Would you trust online backups”?

His reply?

“Well, would YOU?”

I have no idea if he REALLY understood the question, but it was enough to stop me in my tracks, with the sound of a record needle swiping across the grooves. It’s at this point, I paint the darker side about this particular online backup idea.

The first thing is… yes, it costs money. After my “Before I’m 30″ post, I thought the idea of my last days in my 3rd decade were to be a little more frugal, and actually SAVE money. Technically I could save £20 a month with things I can stop paying for, and seeing as Mozy works out at £3.34 a month (at the time of typing), money isn’t going to be an issue.

A couple of other issues is my ISP. I have a lot of data on this machine which is ripe for backing up. Virgin aren’t famed for letting you throw gigabytes of data around the internet. In fact, a lot of UK ISPs are the same. Would Virgin still be friends with me if I uploaded 100Gb or so? Probably not. Should the time come where I need to restore this data, would they like me to throw the same amount of data back down their pipes? Of course not.

Also, what is the likelihood of every physical, local backup I’ve made actually failing? Am I being just too paranoid?

Another thing is that Mozy and another company have formed into a new company… “Decho”. Another thing which has caused the record needle in my head to dart about like a failng hard drive head is the invitation on the site to “Please protect yourself with our first offering”… does this mean that they’re going to have bigger, better products in the future, and if I sign up now, I’m going to be joining an inferior product?

Glen suggested an alternative back around the time when I asked for the signups, named humyo.com. It’s considerably more expensive than Mozy at £3.99 per month, and where Mozy offers unlimited space, with Humyo, you only (I can’t believe I just typed only) get 100Gb. After that, it’s an extra £49.99 per 100Gb.

I shall make a firm decision soon. And yes, this has been the dullest blog post ever.